Digital signal coding, storage, retrieval, control, and processing of document data types in real-time represents the most time-critical functional component for many of the emerging computing, communication, and storage systems or devices. For almost all of the document signal processing technologies which being developed to date, single or plurality of host processors or coprocessors means, in conjunction with additional hardware, firmware, or software means, are proposed according to the existing complex-instruction-set-computing (CISC) or reduced-instruction-set-computing (RISC) principles.
These CISC or RISC host processing or coprocessing techniques can partially improve the performance of specific data subsystems, such as encoding multiple algorithms, managing memory or display devices, and adapting to existing DOS, OS2, WINDOW, NT, or UNIX application and system environments. Typically, they can be readily implemented either in hardware, firmware, or software means embedded with custom integrated circuit, digital signal processor, or application specific integrated circuit (ASIC's). Though practical, the speed and performance of these technologies are severely limited by the overall system throughput, and the run-time architectural supports for processing; networking; program control; and memory management imposed by the CISC and RISC data computing principles.
Since CISC and RISC technologies have primarily invented to optimize the run-time data computation performance for fixed or floating point data operations, run-time procedure and data are typically coded, stored and retrieved in specific file format from local or remote disk storage. Therefore, CISC and RISC computing devices becomes insufficient to meet real-time performance when it is required to interactively manipulate, retrieve, and process variable-size document data types, and to provide direct real-time architectural support for distributed processing and database programming environment. For example, please refer to U.S. Pat. No. 5,056,154 to Aono, U.S. Pat. No. 5,047,953 to smallwood, U.S. Pat. No. 5,010,495 to Willetts, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,899,148 to Sato.
While the aforesaid patents teach individual method and apparatus for compressing and decompressing the binary document image data, improving the document data frame memory subsystem performance, and enhancing the visual quality for display or printout of the decompressed document image, none of aforesaid patents have ever directed themselves to the concept and structure of a novel method and apparatus for more generalized computing platform which would interconnect all the data processing machines for enterprise, consumer, and communications, and allow individuals to create, augment, select, interpret, retrieve, update, and present multiple forms of compound document data, including annotated descriptions of sound, image, graphics, and live video sequence in a coherent and effective system architecture which would automatically adjust to each individually available processor and memory bandwidth, capable of communicating in multiple bandwidths to traverse through wide ranges of networks, prioritize each individual complex document data types, and allow for optimum performance for complex document data interpretation and processing.
More significantly, although all these prior arts have shown CISC and RISC can be extremely suitable for traditional computation-intensive application and programming environments. None of the aforesaid patents have directed themselves to the concept and structure of broadening the scope, and to develop a new computing facility. This new computing platform can not only interconnect the regular computers and workstations, but it can also interconnect many other desktop data equipment, including but not limit to, copy machines, scanners, fax machines, printers, televisions, camcorders, telephones, VCR's, CD players, cameras, sensors, or any other consumer and personal communication devices in a totally integrated system and database environment. Consequently, in this novel integrated computing environment, complex document data manipulation, storage, and retrieval gain the highest priority, and achieve the best performance as comparing to traditional data computation tasks, and regular computers and workstations would become a subset of this novel distributed computing platform.
DISC architecture offers a totally new distributed computing platform. Distinguish from all the prior arts which have adapted the traditional CISC or RISC computing discipline, DISC provides new methods and apparatus to organize a plurality of complex document data types, DISC also streamline, optimize and preschedule the document instruction clusters, and provide parallel or pipeline execution for these instructions. DISC further provide hardware architectural supports to efficiently execute high-level programming and database language constructs, and to facilitate CISC or RISC application coprocessor for traditional DOS or UNIX applications. Finally, DISC provide distributed object-oriented operating-system interface to support supplemental execution of traditional DOS or UNIX application tasks with the real time DISC document signal processing.